Marmion

the ‘riven banner’:-

        ‘It was guarded well and long 
      By your brothers and your children, 
        By the valiant and the strong. 
      One by one they fell around it, 
        As the archers laid them low, 
      Grimly dying, still unconquered, 
        With their faces to the foe.’

line 1059. Lockhart here gives an extract from Jeffrey:-‘The powerful poetry of these passages can receive no illustration from any praise or observations of ours. It is superior, in our apprehension, to all that this author has hitherto produced; and, with a few faults of diction, equal to any thing that has ever been written upon similar subjects. From the moment the author gets in sight of FIodden Field, indeed, to the end of the poem, there is no tame writing, and no intervention of ordinary passages. He does not once flag or grow tedious; and neither stops to describe dresses and ceremonies, nor to commemorate the harsh names of feudal barons from the Border. There is a flight of five or six hundred lines, in short, in which he never stoops his wing, nor wavers in his course; but carries the reader forward with a more rapid, sustained, and lofty movement, than any epic bard that we can at present remember.’

Stanza XXXV. 1. 1067. Lockhart quotes from Byron’s ‘Lara’ as a parallel,-

     ‘Day glimmers on the dying and the dead, 
      The cloven cuirass, and the helmless head,’ &c.

line 1084. ‘There can be no doubt that King James fell in the battle of Flodden. He was killed, says the curious French Gazette, within a lance’s length of the Earl of Surrey; and the same account adds, that none of his division were made prisoners, though many were killed; a circumstance that testifies the desperation of their resistance. The Scottish historians record many of the idle reports which passed among the vulgar of their day. Home was accused, by the popular voice, not only of failing to support the King, but even of having carried him out of the field, and murdered him. And this tale was revived in my remembrance, by an unauthenticated story of a skeleton, wrapped in a bull’s hide, and surrounded with an iron chain, said to have been found in the well of Home Castle, for which, on enquiry, I could never find any better authority than the sexton of the parish having said, that, if the well were cleaned out, he would not be surprised at such a discovery. Home was the chamberlain of the King, and his prime favourite; he had much to lose (in fact did lose all) in consequence of James’s death, and nothing earthly to gain by that event: but the retreat, or inactivity, of the left wing, which he commanded, after defeating Sir Edmund Howard, and even the circumstance of his returning unhurt, and loaded with spoil, from so fatal a conflict, rendered the propagation of any calumny against him easy and acceptable. Other reports gave a still more romantic turn to the King’s fate, and averred, that James, weary of greatness after the carnage among his nobles, had gone on a pilgrimage, to merit absolution for the death of his father, and the breach of his oath of amity to Henry. In particular, it was objected to the English, that they could never show the token of the iron belt; which, however, he was likely enough to have laid aside on the day of battle, as encumbering his personal exertions. They produce a better evidence, the monarch’s sword and dagger, which are still preserved in the Herald’s College in London. Stowe has recorded a degrading story of the disgrace with which the remains of the unfortunate monarch were treated in his time. An unhewn column marks the spot where James fell, still called the King’s Stone.’-SCOTT. See also Mr. Jerningham’s ‘Norham Castle,’ chap. xi.

line 1084. See above, V. vii, &c.

Stanza XXXVI. line 1096. ‘This storm of Lichfield Cathedral, which had been garrisoned on the part of the King, took place in the Great Civil War. Lord Brook, who, with Sir John Gill, commanded the assailants, was shot with a musket-ball through the vizor of his helmet. The royalists remarked that he was killed by a shot fired from St. Chad’s Cathedral, and upon St. Chad’s day, and received his death-wound in the very eye with which, he had said, he hoped to see the ruin of all the cathedrals in England. The magnificent church in question suffered cruelly upon this, and other occasions; the principal spire being ruined by the fire of the besiegers.’-SCOTT.

Ceadda, or Chad, after resigning the bishopric of York in 669 A. D., was appointed Bp. of Lichfield, where he ‘lived for a little while in great holiness.’ See Hunt’s ‘English Church in the Middle Ages,’ p. 17.

line 1110. The allusion is to the old fragment on Flodden, which has been so skilfully extended by Jean Elliot and also by Mrs. Cockburn in their national lyrics, ‘The Flowers o’ the Forest.’

line 1117. Once more the poet uses the irony of events with significant force.

Stanza XXXVII. line 1125. There is now a font of stone with a drinking cup, and an inscription on the back of the font runs thus:-

     ‘Drink, weary pilgrim, drink and stay, 
      Rest by the well of Sybil Grey.’

Stanza XXXVIII. In this stanza the poet indicates the spirit in which romances are written, clearly indicating that those only that have ears will be able to hear. ‘Phonanta